TORONTO - As soon as Dave Bidini put the word out that he was writing a book about Gordon Lightfoot, the stories started to pour in.

Bidini, the former Rheostatics singer, has plenty of friends in rock 'n' roll, and they had plenty of tangled yarns to spin about the 72-year-old Canuck singer for "Writing Gordon Lightfoot."

Some were flattering, but most were definitely not.

"People would be like: 'I have a great Lightfoot story,' and it would inevitably turn out to be a horrible Lightfoot story," Bidini said in an interview this week at a Toronto cafe.

"There's a book that could come out for sure that would just be about that, just be about him being a mean drunk and a bad husband ... But if you put too many episodes in a book like that, that's all people are going to take away from it, and I wanted people to come away with a fuller impression of who the person was, about this life lived in Canadian music."

"And actually one of the things I say in the book is I sort of approach Gord and I say: 'I hope you're grateful that it's me writing the book and not some muck-raking journalist."'

That Bidini wanted to protect Lightfoot's legacy -- or at least his dignity -- might imply some sort of friendly relationship between the two Canadian rockers. But in fact, Bidini says that Lightfoot refused to be interviewed for the book despite his persistent requests.

In the text, Bidini offers a couple of theories for Lightfoot's non-participation. Years ago, the Rheostatics covered "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and Bidini and his bandmates thought the Orillia, Ont., country-folk legend might have liked their version.

So they directed it to Lightfoot's manager at the time, Barry Harvey, who has since died. Bidini remembers Harvey telling him that he wouldn't give the song to Lightfoot because it would just annoy the singer. The group was disappointed, and some time later, Bidini slighted Lightfoot in an interview, suggesting that the Canuck icon had swiped the melody for "Fitzgerald" from an old Irish folk tune (Bidini himself heard this rumour at a pub in Cork, Ireland). Harvey asked for a retraction and Bidini agreed, but says that once the comments had hit the Internet, it was too late.

So, the two artists weren't exactly friends. Still, Bidini believes the primary reason Lightfoot didn't want to participate in the book is that the songwriting stalwart simply has no interest in revisiting the still-tender wounds of his past.

And "Writing Gordon Lightfoot" does zero in on a particularly difficult period in his career. The book is structured around the events of one week in July 1972, when some of the biggest names in music -- including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and, yes, Lightfoot -- descended on tiny Toronto Island to make surprise appearances at the Mariposa Folk Festival.

At the time, the book says, Lightfoot had been forced to curtail his touring schedule due to Bell's palsy, which had temporarily left his face partially paralyzed, his first marriage was crumbling (he would divorce in '73), and he was dating Cathy Smith -- the same woman who would later serve time in a California prison for injecting actor John Belushi with a fatal dose of heroin and cocaine in 1982.

The tumult that Lightfoot was enduring in his personal life seemed to evaporate for a brief moment at Mariposa, when he showed up unannounced, sat down and quietly strummed an acoustic guitar in the middle of the festival grounds -- at a tree stump, or on a rock, or on a picnic table, depending on whose version of events you believe.

"It was this wonderful moment of purity at a time in Gord's life when things were really bad and complicated," said Bidini, 48.

Bidini calls the week of Mariposa the moment that "Canadian culture kind of matured." Yet he admits he was a little bit "neurotic" about writing a book about just one person, so he also found space to venture into other events of the uncommonly momentous week -- the selection of Canada's hockey entry to the Summit Series, the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky chess showdown and the Pioneer 10 becoming the first spacecraft to enter Jupiter's asteroid belt, to name a few.

Bidini's interest in Lightfoot, meanwhile, dates back to the '80s, when the Rheostatics tossed off the "Edmund Fitzgerald" cover at a club in Thunder Bay, Ont., and the crowd went into a frenzy. Still, Bidini didn't want to do a straight biography that focused merely on the mundane details -- as he puts it -- of Lightfoot's life.

Instead, Bidini blended fact and fiction, occasionally giving the text over to his own ruminations on what a certain scene might have looked like. He also wrote a series of letters addressed directly to Lightfoot, which often only barely conceal Bidini's frustration at the singer's refusal to talk to him.

"I was frustrated for a long time, again until I found out I could use the fictional device to kind of build the story," Bidini said. "And once I decided on that, it was quite liberating."

Given the nature of the project, it's perhaps understandable that Bidini found it difficult to assemble a complete, coherent sketch of Lightfoot's personality.

Different accounts from different sources revealed vastly different perceptions of the iconic singer, with some painting him as an irascible chauvinist, and others as a warm, generous soul.

But Bidini believes that Lightfoot has become more social, and less elusive, over time.

"I think he's less difficult to nail down as a person ... as he's gotten older," said Bidini, who's in the process of wrapping a new Bidiniband album entitled "In the Rock Hall."

"People have said he's become a lot more open and a lot more social, he goes out a lot more, a lot more communicative."

Bidini only actually met Lightfoot once, in an elevator in Quebec City in 1987. (Bidini asked how the previous night's performance went, and Lightfoot responded that "'Early Morning Rain' was a little fast." That was it.)

It's not clear what Lightfoot thinks of Bidini's book. The singing icon's publicist did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Bidini says mutual friends have pledged to get a copy of to Lightfoot, though the author isn't concerned about whether he reads it.

"People have asked me, what's he going to think of this? And I don't care. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what he thinks in a way. However, I'd love to talk to the guy. It'd be super fun. He can come over for dinner any time."

And what would Bidini ask him if finally afforded the opportunity?

"I'd like to find out if he liked our version of the song, basically," he laughed.